Retrovirus

Once more, little guys doing the games that the big publishers aren't touching anymore. When I was young and unable to afford a gamer's PC, my totally spoiled best friend was hooked on Descent 2. Descent played as a cross between Doom and WIng Commander - the player could fly and shoot in every direction, but the game took place in underground mines and laboratories rather than in open darkness. This gameplay felt faster and had a higher skill cap than other early FPSs, but it felt more focused and explorable than open-space flight sims. I don't actually know of any other games that have tried to do something similar… until today! Now is the time! Kill all the things!!!

Anyway, Retrovirus has similar facets to the Descent series, from the sci-fi atmosphere to the combat in cramped quarters. The world is the stylization inner workings of a computer, where the e-mail server is a series of conveyor belts delivering messages and the serial bus to the web server resembles a subway. A worm has infested the system - looking much like, y'know, a worm, leaving packets of spiderweb-like corruption in its wake. An Oracle NPC commands you, a floating antiviral pod, to follow the worm's path through Tron-like structures and delivery tubes. (It's not like a truck! It's a series of tubes!) It's an inventive setting where the artists were free to drop things wherever they wanted and work from style rather than pre-existing structures. It's just too bad they didn't label the exits.

This starts a laundry list of "This is great, but…" statements that apply to this game. I can't say how much of my gametime was spent in rooms where I had destroyed every enemy but couldn't find the door leading onward. There's a lot of sound and color in the game's design, but that noise often obscures the map. Heaven help you when there's a room with two doors out, and the vertigo effect of rotating on every axis makes you forget where you've already been. The linear, one-room-to-the-next story path increases that frustration, since there's only so much reason to explore dark corners. Red herring paths don't help the confusion - the transport tubes with solid nope-don't-go-here tiles at the end can go to hell.

Thankfully, the environment isn't such a problem for combat. Enemies manifest as corrupted robots and angry bug monsters. Pressing the "scan" button highlights enemies with a glowing red border, making them pop out even when behind cover. Holding the button down for a few seconds lights up every enemy in the vicinity. Where Strike Suit Zero had me frantically looking around for my missile targets, Retrovirus makes it clear where the last bug is hiding behind a pipe in the floor. I do appreciate spending more time shooting bugs and less time wondering where they're hiding.

But combat is missing something. What I want from this game is spacefighting in a restricted space. I want to be flying past other little rocketships in a gravity-free joust, trying to catch shots as we zoom past and around each other. Retrovirus's enemies mostly float in one spot and fire on you from afar. They do move to stay in range and give chase if you retreat, but my primary strategy for fighting back was just parking the ship and returning fire. The melee-class enemies are an exception, zooming at you so quickly that there's no room for evasive maneuvers. Mixed encounters usually required I quickly kill the melee bruisers while avoiding ranged fire.

This is not to say that the combat isn't fun. There's still something plenty engaging about gliding through a shooting gallery of evil robots, looking for spots to turn around and laser things in their laser faces with lasers. It gets better when the game throws a new weapon at you every couple of levels, starting you off with a slow blaster, then a shotgun, and later a railgun. Customization increases the variety - leveling up gives you access to upgrades that turn a single railgun into a double, make shotgun blasts bounce off of walls, or upgrade speed and health regeneration. (And a bit of gratitude here for allowing instant respecs for fully messing with different combos.)

But weapon variations don't make up for swings of difficulty. In one of the early levels, the NPC tells you that the next area is heavy with bugs, so you might want to just fly through the gauntlet to the next area. She doesn't tell you where the exits are, though, so flying into the mess just gets you killed while you scan for the door. With so much laser fire in the room, stopping to fight back is also a losing proposition. I figure out that the level - and nearly every fight after that - can be beaten Gears-of-War-style. I peeked out of the entrance just enough to snipe at a few bugs, ducked behind the door when I needed a breather, and pulled out the shotgun for the melee guys that closed in, like I was playing a cover-based shooter. That's not a terrible thing, but it feels like that wasn't in the game's mission statement.

I spent a lot of time trying to decide how much I actually liked Retrovirus. For half of the game, I was thinking, "oh crap, oh crap, get these stupid things off me, boom, die you virus scum, I am Bob hahahaha," and the other half was, "I am really tired of mindlessly flying through tubes, and why hasn't some safety administration required clearly marked exit signs in case of flame war." This is a big, pretty, spacey world, with a lot of single-player and PvP content that I didn't get to. (I have to admit intrigue at the "moba" deathmatch mode.) But I never felt the sense of exploration and fast-paced assault that was Descent, and the multiplayer rooms were empty whenever I was online. I guess I ultimately credit Retrovirus for its style and objective, even if the execution has memory leaks.